Thursday, September 22, 2011

Combining the Marsyas python bindings with the matplotlib library for plotting in Python creates a great environment for prototyping. In the past few months I have done a lot of Marsyas work using this approach and really enjoy it. It gives a lot of the expressive power and prototyping of MATLAB while retaining the data-flow model and efficient processing of Marsyas. Unfortunately getting everything installed and setup for the first time takes some effort.

I recently did an installation on a fresh copy of Ubuntu 11.04 - Natty Narwhal - 32 bits and in this blog post I will share the steps I had to take. As usual the exact details change over time so the instructions are slightly different from previous versions of Ubuntu. These instructions can also be found in the Marsyas User Manual as part of the installation instructions for specific systems.

The first step is to get subversion and cmake installed. I did all the package installation directly using apt-get but you can also use the Synaptic package manager for that purpose. Lines that start with $ are to be typed in the terminal. The others are simply comments describing the steps.

After running these commands you should be able to see a nice generated figure looking like the image above this paragraph. If you look at the code of windowing.py you will see that the comlputation of the figure data is done through Marsyas. All you need to do is import marsyas at the top of your Python source code. In a future post I will show some utilities that making plotting data from Marsyas networks easy and save you time.